The Zither is a stringed instrument, having many strings stretched across a thin, wooden sound box. It is played by strumming or plucking the strings, either with fingers or with a plec.

The strings on the Concert Zither are arranged as follows: 5 fretted melody strings, placed above a guitar-like fretboard, then 14 unfretted "accompaniment" strings; followed by 11 unfretted "bass" strings and finally 6 "contrabass" strings. The concert Zither has a rough and raunchy sound often described as "mellow".

Here's what Cinematique Instruments did:

"We treated the Concert Zither very hard. We plucked, stroke and strummed all the strings to get every possible sound, noise and articulation the Zither can make. Finally we assembled 6 different patches. Firstly there are two the main patch with all the 36 strings recorded in 4 round robin variations and several (up to four) dynamic layer. We additionally recorded the 31 accompaniment strings in a muted variation.

All these notes were recorded with two different types of microphones: a large-diaphragm condenser pair as well as a classic dynamic microphone. By turning a corresponding mic balance knob you can infinitely mix between these two different sound properties. Finally - in order to shape the sound - we added a complex script to achieve lots of different variations of the Concert Zither. By moving the mod wheel you can fade between vibrato and non-vibrato notes.